Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Proquest Content Update

The latest content update from Proquest (Feb 2, 2006) contained a long list of permission changes that signal a disturbing trend. Euromoney Institutional Investor,Palgrave Macmillan,and Emerald Group, major publishers of important finance journals, are lengthening their embargo period to 12 months. My quick check found that most of these journals have an embargo period of 4 or 5 months in Business Source Premier.

Two questions need to be answered: Is ABI/Inform losing critical content and currency?; Do we need to subscribe to both the print and online versions of journals to serve our users?. It seems to me that by including more and more titles with embargo periods of a year, ABI becomes a database for "historical" research or even a historical repository, following the JSTOR model.

Other content changes include:
Discontinued full text coverage of the Journal of Business and Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and The American Statistician published by the Anmerican Statistical Association
- discontinued full text coverage for several regional business journals published by American City Business Journals
- discontinued coverage of The Wall Street Transcript.

No comments: